Ro-Busters began life in the pages of 2000AD's short lived sister publication Starlord in 1978. Writer Pat Mills was given the brief of originating a 'disaster' story, involving 'Biggles-type characters wandering around doing unlikely things like plugging up volcanoes.' Long standing arguments between the staff of 2000AD and it's then publisher IPC led Mills into an act of rebellion; he developed the idea into that of a 'Robot Disaster Squad,' with artist Kevin O'Neill designing a group of robots completely devoid of human features with which the readers could identify.

Spawned from the disillusion and continuing conflicts between the 2000AD/Starlord editorial staff and IPC, Ro-Busters carried a very anti-authoritarian message (that Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill later brought to ABC Warriors and then (in a slightly different and more extreme guise) Nemesis The Warlock), but also entrenched in its pages was a commentary on the class structure of England at the time. The robots peppering the stories essentialy represented something approximating the sub-working classes, unaware of any other life outside of serving their human masters. The strip ran through all 22 issues of Starlord, and introduced the world to Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein (their names being a play on those of composers Rogers and Hammerstein, responsible for musicals such as The King & I), their semi-human boss Howard Quartz (aka 'Mr Ten Per-Cent'), and the irrepressible Mek-Quake. With everything now in place, Pat Mills decided to leave the series after the first twelve issues of Starlord, and it fell to Chris Lowder and V. Gross to pick up the reigns for the remaining issues.

Failing to match the success of it's sister title, Starlord was merged with 2000AD in October 1978, bringing with it what became two classic 2000AD strips: Ro-Busters and Strontium Dog. However, continual rows with 2000AD's editorial staff and IPC management caused big changes behind the scenes of the Galaxy's Greatest before the merge, which led to Kevin O'Neill resigning as art editor. But he and departing sub-editor Nick Landau managed to convince Pat Mills to return to 2000AD, and he picked up the reigns of Ro-Busters once more. With Dave Gibbons handling the art, Death on the Orient Express became the first adventure of Hammer-Stein and Ro-Jaws to appear in 2000AD.

After a series of fun-filled adventures with a variety of artists at the helm, Mills tired of creating disasters for Ro-Busters and had decided to end the series with the 2000AD classic The Terra-Meks (Progs 98-101), the tale of a simple Ships Pilot robot, Charlie, who helps save the city of Northpool from destruction by Howard Quartz and The Terra-Meks. However, the popularity of Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein - which had paved the way for their own 'origin stories,' Hammer-Stein's War Memories (Progs 88-92) and Ro-Jaws Memoirs (Progs 93-97) - proved to be too much, and they went on to appear in one final story, The Fall and Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein (Progs 103-115).

Work for Ro-Busters had dried up, so Howard Quartz tried a desperate bid to cut his losses and packed the clapped out robots on board a ship, so he could blow it up and claim on the insurance. As the unsuspecting robots sang their song and boarded the ship, Quartz's secretary, Miss Marilyn, tipped off Ro-Jaws to the impending disaster, allowing the robots to mount a daring escape and search for their freedom.

It was during this farewell story that Mills and O'Neill fostered the idea of something called the 'Terror Tube.' A visually spectacular concept, it was disliked immensely by IPC managing editor (and unofficial censor) Bob Bartholomew, and pulled from the final story, much to the disappointment and anger of its creators. However, the concept was to resurface a mere year later in ground breaking one-off, which laid the foundations for one of 2000AD's most enduring series, Nemesis The Warlock.

With this story over, Mills finally laid the series to rest in the pages of 2000AD, with Hammer-Stein and Ro-Jaws wandering off into the sunset. It still had it's fans, however, and Ro-Busters made several appearances in various 2000AD annuals. Limited budgets of the time meant that a third of the pages had to be filled with reprint, but, to complicate matters further, IPC operated a strict policy forbidding the reprinting of any material more than five years old - it was accepted wisdom that comic readers grew out of strips after five years, so after than time it was safe to re-run older strips. Ro-Busters, though, had five brand new stories, the last three of which were penned by Alan Moore.

With the conclusion of the series in 1979, both Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein went on to find work in other strips: Ro-Jaws' Robo-Tales and, of course, ABC Warriors. While Mek-Quake managed to muscle into an appearance in Nemesis Book 3: The World of Nemesis (Progs 335-349) - albeit in a different body - Howard Quartz and Miss Marilyn failed to materialise again after their annual appearances. Following the end of the original ABC Warriors run in 1979, and then the end of Robo-Tales in 1982, none of the Ro-Busters team were heard from again in the pages of 2000AD until Ro-Jaws made his triumphant return as 'personal valet' to The Warlock Nemesis in the multi-award winning The Gothic Empire (Progs 387-406). Later in that same series, Hammer-Stein made his own triumphant return, albeit a more troubled and downcast mek-man.

Interesting to note is that the original run of the 'sequel' strip, ABC Warriors takes place after the 'flashback' story Hammer-Stein's War Memoirs, but before the 'contemporary' tales of Hammer-Stein and co. All subsequent ABC Warriors tales (Black Hole etc.) take place centuries after. However, this doesn't explain why Hammer-Stein is still in his ABC Warriors guise during these later adventures, rather than his 'later' Ro-Busters body...

Although there's been no return from the dead for Ro-Busters, the original stories have found themselves reprinted more than a few times, and the series has long since established itself as one of the all time classic 2000AD Thrills. But if it had carried on, who knows what might have happened...

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